Subscribe To

Wednesday, 31 July 2013

Feeling this pain won’t kill you; not feeling WILL

Last
night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray
foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a
leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker
part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward.
After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the
right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the
left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the
night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for
a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long
before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After a brief nap, he
went away. The raccoon came back and brought two friends. When they
left the foxes returned, and after the foxes came the bear. The
evening was like a French farce: As one character exited stage left,
another entered stage right.

Although
I see some of these nonhuman neighbors daily, I was entranced and
delighted to see so many of them over the span of just one evening. I
remained delighted until sometime the next day, when I remembered
reading that, prior to conquest by the Europeans, people in this
region could expect to see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes.

This
phenomenon is something we all encounter daily, even if some of us
rarely notice it. It happens often enough to have a name: declining
baselines. The phrase describes the process of becoming accustomed to
and accepting as normal worsening conditions. Along with
normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this
way. And this can lead to further acceptance and further
normalization, which leads to further amnesia, and so on. Meanwhile
the world is killed, species by species, biome by biome. And we are
happy when we see the ever-dwindling number of survivors.

I’ve
gone on the salmon-spawning tours that local environmentalists give,
and I’m not the only person who by the end is openly weeping. If
we’re lucky, we see 15 fish. Prior to conquest there were so many
fish the rivers were described as “black and roiling.” And it’s
not just salmon. Only five years ago, whenever I’d pick up a piece
of firewood, I’d have to take off a half-dozen sowbugs. It’s
taken me all winter this year to see as many. And I used to go on
spider patrol before I took a shower, in order to remove them to
safety before the deluge. I still go on spider patrol, but now it’s
mostly pro forma. The spiders are gone. My mother used to put up five
hummingbird feeders, and the birds would fight over those. Now she
puts up two, and as often as not the sugar ferments before anyone
eats it. I used to routinely see bats in the summer. Last year I saw
one.

You
can transpose this story to wherever you live and whatever members of
the nonhuman community live there with you. I was horrified a few
years ago to read that many songbird populations on the Atlantic
Seaboard have collapsed by up to 80 percent over the last 40 years.
But, and this is precisely the point, I was even more horrified when
I realized that Silent Spring came out more than 40 years ago, so
this 80 percent decline followed an already huge decline caused by
pesticides, which followed another undoubtedly huge decline caused by
the deforestation, conversion to agriculture, and urbanization that
followed conquest.

My
great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a
tiny girl—in other words, only four human generations ago—there
were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid
lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.
Who in Nebraska today worries about being trampled by bison? For that
matter, who in Nebraska today even thinks about bison on a monthly,
much less daily, basis?

This
state of affairs is problematic for many reasons, not the least of
which is that it’s harder to fight for what you don’t love than
for what you do, and it’s hard to love what you don’t know you’re
missing. It’s harder still to fight an injustice you do not
perceive as an injustice but rather as just the way things are. How
can you fight an injustice you never think about because it never
occurs to you that things have ever been any different?

Declining
baselines apply not only to the environment but to many fields. Take
surveillance. Back in the 1930s, there were people who freaked out at
the notion of being assigned a Social Security number, as it was “a
number that will follow you from cradle to grave.” But since 9/11,
according to former National Security Agency official William Binney,
the U.S. government has been retaining every email sent, in case any
of us ever does anything the government doesn’t like. How many
people complain about that? And it’s not just the government. I
received spam birthday greetings this year from all sorts of
commercial websites. How and why does ESPN.com have my birth date?
And remember the fight about GMOs? They were perceived as scary
(because they are), and now they’re all over the place, but most
people don’t know or don’t care. The same goes for
nanotechnology.

Yesterday
I ate a strawberry. Or rather, I ate a strawberry-shaped object that
didn’t have much taste. When did we stop noticing that
strawberries/plums/tomatoes no longer taste like what they resemble?
In my 20s I rented a house where a previous resident’s cat had
pooped all over the dirt basement, which happened to be where the air
intakes for the furnace were located. The house smelled like cat
feces. After I’d been there a few months, I wrote to a friend, “At
first the smell really got to me, but then, as with everything, I got
used to the stench and it just doesn’t bother me anymore.”

This
is a process we need to stop. Milan Kundera famously wrote, “The
struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting.” Everything in this culture is aimed at helping to
distract us from—or better, help us to forget—the injustices, the
pain. And it is completely normal for us to want to be distracted
from or to forget pain. Pain hurts. Which is why on every level from
somatic reflex to socially constructed means of denial we have
pathways to avoid it.

But
here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you
to listen to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing)
fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a
city—I want you to picture the land as it was before the land was
built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to
feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin
keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year
you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day
you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short,
I want you to pay attention.

If
you do this, your baseline will stop declining, because you’ll have
a record of what’s being lost.

Do
not go numb in the face of this data. Do not turn away. I want you to
feel the pain. Keep it like a coal inside your coat, a coal that
burns and burns. I want all of us to do this, because we should all
want the pain of injustice to stop. We should want this pain to stop
not because we get used to it and it just doesn’t bother us
anymore, but because we stop the injustices and destruction that are
causing the pain in the first place. I want us to feel how awful the
destruction is, and then act from this feeling.

And
I promise you two things. One: Feeling this pain won’t kill you.
And two: Not feeling this pain, continuing to go numb and avoid it,
will.